Legislature must fix common school funding sources

The Washington State School Directors’ Association recently made available its proposed legislative priorities for the 2015 legislative session. Delegates to the 2014 Legislative Assembly approved 45 new proposals, added 16 new proposals to WSSDA’s “Standing Legislative Positions” (SLPs) and amended three other SLPs.

Delegates then ranked them, with the top three being: 1) Full funding of basic education (SLP), 2) Sustainable revenues for education funding (new) and 3) School construction funding (SLP).

Washington is unique in that our constitution makes it the state’s paramount duty to provide basic education for “all children residing within its border.” That same article requires the legislature to provide “for a general and uniform system of public schools,” establishes a common school fund, a common school construction fund and sets forth how revenues for the funds are produced.

The article doesn’t say anything about a constitutional requirement to “fully fund” education. That comes from the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling in a 1978 case involving Seattle Public Schools, and is in essence a logical outcome from the requirement to provide for basic education and a uniform public school system.

The Legislature established a definition for basic education in the 2009-11 biennium as well as a funding mechanism to pay local school districts for it, and then subsequently declined to pay for its complete implementation.

It’s more complicated than that, but in essence that’s what the well-publicized Supreme Court’s McCleary decision amounts to. Now, the Legislature is under court order to find this funding for implementing its basic education definition by 2018 as per its own law, an amount the Office of Financial Management estimates at $5.7 billion over the next two biennia.

Problem is we don’t have the money. Even with a projected $2.6 billion in additional revenues, OFM still projects the state to be about $900 million short of meeting financial requirements for other projected additional needs, and that’s before finding $1.2 billion to $2 billion to satisfy McCleary.

Some legislators and individuals suggest a fix for school funding would be to fund schools first, and then let the other agencies compete for what’s left over. There are several things wrong with this approach.

First, the only place this funding could come from is the one third of the general fund not protected by constitutional and federal requirements. This one-third of the general fund pays for, among many things, corrections, higher education and human support services — some of which go to families in need for a variety of social and economic reasons.

Taking from this piece of the pie amounts to a de facto budget cut that could harm families, students and society. It could also foster a form of institutional budget resentment between education and other state agencies and those they support.

Part of the state’s problem is revenue. According to OFM, in 1990 about 7 percent of state personal income went into the state’s general fund. If that were true today, the state would have $15 billion in additional revenue to spend.

Instead of looking to cut other services to fund K-12 education, the Legislature needs to look at restoring and modernizing the revenue sources for the common school fund, which include proceeds from stone and mineral sales from state lands, among other out-dated things. This could provide for a sustainable source for basic education funding, one of WSSDA’s legislative points.

But it should also be spelled out to education that the days of using more money to fix problems need to be over. We as taxpayers can’t afford it and demand better results.

According to the Office of the Superintendent for Public Instruction, Washington’s four-year graduation rate in 2012 was 77.2 percent, a .06 percent increase over 2011 but still below the national average of 80 percent. If we are the only state to make basic education the “paramount duty” of the state, we should be doing better than the national average, and those students should be fully prepared to enter college, which colleges say is not always the case.

While school districts do a good job of managing their funding, we as citizens need to take a more active and discerning role in how this is done. We need to be more skeptical about requests, especially when the term “state of the art” is bantered about.

Because in the end, the reality is education is more than just “about the kids.” It’s about all of us.